1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a wiping unit that performs wiping cleaning with respect to a recording head of an inkjet printer or the like, and an inkjet printer equipped with the wiping unit.
2. Related Background Art
A mechanism for maintaining the performance of a recording head that injects ink is indispensable for an inkjet printer, and is provided in most of the models. Among them, a nozzle cleaning mechanism that cleans a nozzle line surface (nozzle plate) of a recording head is important because, when ink droplets remain on the nozzle plate, or dust or the like adheres thereto, ink droplets to be injected are curved or ink cannot be injected from the nozzle, which has a serious effect on an image quality and the formation of an image.
A typical example of the nozzle cleaning mechanism includes a mechanism having a configuration of wiping a nozzle plate with a wiping blade (hereinafter, simply referred to as a “blade”). However, when contamination of ink or the like adhering to the blade after being wiped is left, the remaining ink is pushed in the nozzle due to the pressure acting on the blade, which causes inconvenience such as the destruction of meniscus of ink and clogging of the nozzle.
In order to solve the above problem, according to the JP 2002-79681 A, there is known a nozzle cleaner, which vibrates a blade, from which ink adhering to a nozzle plate has been wiped, when the blade moves to an ink removal portion to remove ink and dust adhering to the surface of the blade.
However, even with the nozzle cleaner described in Patent Document 1, it is actually difficult to remove the entire contamination of ink or the like adhering to a blade with one cleaning operation. In a nozzle cleaning mechanism, a configuration of wiping the surface of a blade with a sponge or the like after soaking the wiped blade in a detergent to make it easy to clean the blade and to remove the contamination on the surface thereof is known. There is a problem with such a configuration that, it is difficult to remove the entire contamination as described above, and hence a great amount of contamination adheres to and is accumulated on the surface of a sponge or the like with which wiping is performed to contaminate the blade again in some cases.
Particularly, in a so-called wide format inkjet printer having a print width exceeding 50 inches, a printing operation with a recording head is performed continuously 10 meters or more, and in this case, the amount of contamination of a nozzle plate increases. Thus, the possibility of the occurrence of the above-mentioned problem increases further.
Further, the nozzle cleaner of Patent Document 1 requires a mechanism for vibrating a blade, and hence an apparatus configuration becomes complicated and a production cost increases.
The present invention has been made in view of the above circumstance, and its object is to provide a wiping unit capable of reliably removing contamination of ink or the like adhering to a blade after wiping in spite of a simple configuration, and an inkjet printer.